


Bad Ending

by Go0se



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: (mentioned briefly) - Freeform, Autopsies, Blood, Dialogue and Sound fic, Dialogue-Only, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Murder, Narrated by strangers, Police are finally informed, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 13:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Too late, the cavalry is notified.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad Ending

**Author's Note:**

> Written before #80, mostly to get it out of my head. I have no idea how cops actually talk about cases so this is probably very inaccurate.

A knock on glass, and then the creak of an opening door. “M’am?”

“Yes, come in. What is it?”  
“Something you need to see. Triple homicide and a suicide. The call came in late two nights ago, from out on the old campus that’s been closed for renovations. Three men and one woman, all in their early to mid twenties, although two didn’t have any ID on them. One man suffered blunt force trauma to the head. A chunk of brick was found nearby covered with blood. The other man was shot in the abdomen and bled out. The woman died from a self-inflicted bullet to the head.”  
“But you said there were four victims?”  
“… it gets strange, m’am.”  
“Well, explain.”  
“It looks like there was some kind of cult or religious influence on the crime. Two masks were found at the scene, both with some amount of blood on them, and there was a placard referencing an ‘ark’ in a room in the basement of the building when the officers searched. The room was covered with some sort of occult symbol, as well. And there was recording equipment found— two handheld video cameras. One was still running on the floor on the scene when the ambulance arrived, and another one with a dead battery was beside on of the male victims.  
The live camera had been running for a long time. Most of the footage was of the crime itself. It appears that the fourth victim was another man that had been tied to a chair but got free somehow. The woman had the gun— she was the one who’d been holding the running camera— but he’d pushed her over and grabbed it himself, then shot the first male victim. The woman knocked the gun out of his hand then and he retaliated, which knocked the camera to the ground. The woman couldn’t be seen but the male victims were still in the shot— the fourth victim dived for a brick chunk just as the second had a coughing fit strong enough to double him over. The fourth victim wrestled the other male victim to the ground easily enough and then choked him before attacking his head. When he was done he stood up and turned toward where the female victim was presumably laying, but he was shot before he could advance. The origin of the bullet is unclear before the first victim crawls into the shot holding a hand to his abdomen and the gun in his opposite hand. He kept crawling toward the other male victim, the one who got strangled. Then there’s a shadow of a sort at the upper corner of the frame, and after that the tape bursts into static until a couple minutes before it runs out. Belhassen said that it was probably damaged in the fall.”

 

“… this fourth victim was the one who killed the first two.”  
“Yes, m’am.”  
“Did the shot the fourth victim suffer look to be fatal?”  
“It’s hard to tell. He didn’t immediately collapse. The footage was blurring and breaking up badly at that point. And, as I said, there were only three bodies found, and although there was enough blood for a fourth person to have bled out there were no drag marks or blood droplets anywhere else on the floor to suggest one had been moved; he just vanished.”  
“Corpses don’t just vanish.”  
“I know, m’am. The officers still couldn’t find another body in the building.”

A low sigh. Then, “Were there any drugs in the victims’ systems?”  
“A pill bottle full of seizure medication was found on the first male victim’s pocket. He and the female victim both had traces of it in their blood. It isn’t known to be a stimulant or induce a high. But there’s still more, m’am.”  
“What.”  
“The three victims who’s bodies we have all had legions on their brains that were discovered in autopsy.”  
“Lesions?”  
“Yes.”  
“Are you telling me I have to call Disease Control?!”  
“Bannatyne thinks they aren’t caused by disease, they look more like… scars. The woman had them more heavily than the other two, although it was a close call. The first male victim’s lesions looked to be the oldest. The second male victim’s were the most fresh.”  
“And that’s not some kind of marker?”  
“Bannatyne seems certain that it was not a disease that cause them. He isn’t sure what did, though. His first thought was childhood surgeries, maybe, except there wasn’t the kind of marks on the skin of their head to support that. He’s in conference with some of his colleagues over it.”

 

“Lord.” A short pause. “And you still look like you have more to say. What else?”  
“… one of the men had ligature marks on his wrists and ankles, and the woman had bruises all over her body as if she’d been bodily tossed around. Like a rag doll.”  
“Signs of sexual assault?”  
“None. But her ribs looked like they’d been broken several times, all of them, and there was a mark on her spine that also showed up on the x-ray that suggested the same. Bannatyne said that it wouldn’t have been compatible with survival in most people but the healing—”  
“Stop. You said she killed herself. How is that possible?”  
“It doesn’t seem possible at all. But she did commit suicide. Afterward. It was the female victim who called the whole thing in, m’am. She left the call running as she, as she shot herself, and the angle of blood at the scene was of a standing person. The gun was found in her hand. Plus the footage found at the scene— I told you there isn’t anything clear until the end of the tape, then the woman’s shoes are visible. You can hear her end of the call, then the gunshot, and she collapses.”  
“Were the other two dead by that time?”  
“They were visible in the background, neither of them moving. The shot stays the same until the tape runs out twenty minutes later. No one else comes into or out of the frame.”

 

A long silence. In the background, muffled by thin walls, phones ring; intermittently there’s the sound of raised voices.

“Do we have any leads.”  
“Well, yes. But nothing that actually helps us, so far, m’am. We have the names of two of the male victims— one of them lives in the area, we’re trying to find out more about him, and the other one’s last listed address was an apartment that burned down two years ago. But we have no idea who the female victim was, or the first male victim, or the motive for any of this. Belhassen hoped that the second camera would help but she says so far its footage is so heavily distorted it’s difficult to see or hear anything.”  
“What about what the woman say when she called the emergency line? Did she say anyone’s name, or why anything?”  
“Just the address of the college itself, and then, ‘It’s done’.”  
“ ‘It’s done’.”  
“Yes, m’am.”  
“Nothing else?”  
“Nothing at all.”  
“… tell the officers I’m going to request federal support. We’re going to need all the help we can get with this.”  
“Right away.” A scrape of the chair across the thin carpet, and a couple seconds later the door clicks shut again.

/


End file.
